Well plunked down the money for a laptop (my first new computer- I've always had used machines) and moved into the 21st century with a modest dual proc in a very inexpensive machine. I actually bought it at Walmart! It's an Acer Aspire 5349-2635

Everything works great, repartitioned Win 7 down to a corner of the drive, installed Lupu 528 v5 frugal.

But....no wireless. I thought that was going to be a piece of cake with Lupu, as it had been installing it in a couple of my older computers. But this time no go

Checking the hard info, the wifi shows up as an Atheros AR9485 based pci. I tried specifying the ath9k module, but the wifi is still unrecognized.

I found a thread in the Ubuntu forum which eventually shows a solution for the same chipset here:

Slacko 5.3.1 was unable to detect the wireless. I also tried loading each of the Atheros modules I could find, but none worked. Definitely not ath9k. I started trying the autoporprobe module function to test all modules, but it was slow going and I gave up after awhile._________________Acer Aspire 5349-2635 laptop dual proc, 4gb ram, frugal Racy 5.5.
1999 Thinkpad 600e hacked Pent 3, overclocked 800 mHz, 490 kb running Lupu 528
Acer Iconia A1-830 x86 tablet -- Puppy some day?

thanks for this. I had the same problem on an Acer 7250 laptop. Although this fixed it as far as the wifi was concerned it prevented the machine from shutting down. It would just show "Lucid is shutting down" then freeze. This was on a full hard disk install. The hack I applied was to add "rmmod ath9k" at the beginning of wmpoweroff and wmreboot.
Now, I'd quite like to make a pet for this module, can anyone point me in the right direction?

I just wanted to comment that this worked for me as well! I recently bought an acer Aspire 5733Z (also a very good deal, like the OP), and it has the Atheros AR9485 adapter as well.

I'm really new to Linux, and I'm attempting to fumble my way through the dark with Slackware 13.37 right now. I was able to get the wired connection running, but the wireless connector didn't even show up (except with lspci).

I searched for a while, tried installed madwifi (supposed to be the best support for Atheros adapters in Linux) but I had no luck at all. This thread finally worked!

I'm also posting this hoping that others who might Google attempting to find an answer for the AR9485 will come across this.

Now I just have to figure out how to set up the setting for my wireless network...

I bought a Gateway LT4009u netbook earlier in the week and haven't been able to use the wireless LAN. My quest to get it working led me here because I have the same Atheros AR9485.

I do not use terminal but I figured I'd try to cut and paste. Not that I would have gotten in right but it seems like the location of the driver is no longer the same. I got a 404 code and tried firefox to see what was up. After http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-2.6/ the next part is a choice of dates. Which one of these would I use if I am even going in the right direction.

Thank you for the Pet. I actually had wireless working for a bit before it disconnected. I'll have to mess around with the proper connection. My wireless lan is WPA2 which last I knew there wasn't much support. I was up on another network which is WPA. Once it disconnected, I couldn't reconnect. I'll figure it out.

I tried to run Slacko 5.33 on my desktop so I could create a usb flash drive but just before the desktop appeared on my monitor, I got an "Out Of Range" error. Tried again and same thing. Don't know what that is about but I'm not going try to solve that any time soon. The CD will be shelved for now.

Thanks for the help. I see someone else already downloaded the pet. The netbook I bought seemed to be the best value for the money (200 bucks) so this pet might help a few people.